The genius tea blend

I admit it. I’m very hard to please when it comes to tea. (Other things too, but that’s beside the point.)

I would love for the family to make tea (the drink) for me. But what if it is too strong, too weak, wrong flavour, too cold or too milky? It doesn’t help that I used to drink very weak and milky tea in the olden days. Witches are allowed to change at any time.

So I generally slave over the hot kettle myself, warming pots and measuring (the right kind of) tea and timing it. Occasionally I give in, and decide that the convenience of remaining sitting down or lying in bed and getting someone else’s tea is a good trade-off. Even if they forget the teacosy.

(I know. I sound like a right cow.)

Then one day this summer Daughter said she’d make the tea for me and our visitors, and I accepted her offer. We sat down – under the apple tree, in case it rained – and she brought the tea tray out. The tea tasted fantastic!

I was so surprised that I had to ask what she’d done. It was neither builder’s teabags, nor any of my leaf tea blends. Turns out Daughter had thrown in both builder’s teabags and one vanilla teabag.

This has since become my reliable teabag tea, which even the Resident IT Consultant can make and get right. I make it myself when I can’t be bothered fiddling with leaf tea and filters and stuff.

To be on the safe side I filled my suitcase with vanilla teabags when returning home. On the off-chance the vanilla tea here isn’t as good.

Starved of book events as I was, it took very little for Ingrid Magnusson Rading to persuade me to join her at the local camp site. Neither of us needed a ‘room’ so to speak, but she was invited as … Continue reading →